June 2017

06/19/2017

kay, this is old news. Really old news. But it's an obvious moment of Celebriclogs worthiness that I've overlooked for years. Until today when I was doing some research on Carly Simon for my day job, and happened upon some photos of her that I just had to share.

But first some "Huh, I didn't know that!" moments from my digging.

Did you know that her father, Richard L. Simon, was the Simon in Simon & Schuster? Did you know that Carly Simon had quite a number of celebrity suitors...including Warren Beatty, Mick Jagger, Kris Kristofferson, and Jack Nicholson? Did you know that on one occasion, Cat Stevens was running late to pick her for a date so she killed the time by putting together a song. Something about how the "anticipation" was "making her wait"? Did you know that she admitted that the song "You're So Vain" was about not just one, but three self-absorbed former lovers? And in the publicity surrounding the release of memoir a couple years back, she confirmed that the second verse was indeed (as was often speculated) about Warren Beatty, but that she has yet to confirm whom the other two verses are about?

But I digress. The whole point of this brief post right now is to share some images from the same photo shoot that resulted in the cover art for Ms. Simon's 1972 release, No Secrets.

It's a fun and carefree look she's sporting that certainly reflects the looser and and more relaxed culture that the world was evolving into in the early '70s. But little did I realize that there was more to like about the outfit than I realized! She's wearing clogs!

You can read more about this particular photo shoot here. Blogger Walter Neff tells the story of how this series of photos and the cover itself came to be:

The photographer was Ed Caraeff, and the session took place in London while she recorded No Secrets at Trident Studios in Soho. As the other photographs (below) demonstrate, they went through a number of settings and changes of clothes, some of which nodded to the album's first single by featuring a hat that could be strategically dipped below one eye and a scarf that was apricot. At the end of the session, however, Caraeff was not convinced that he had finished the job. Hence, he followed her as she returned to the Portobello Hotel, on Stanley Gardens in Notting Hill, and he continued snapping on the street. It was this impromptu session, unplanned and late in the day, that ultimately yielded the album's cover shot.

06/18/2017

promised myself not to be a blogger who lets my blog languish. I hate to run across a website where that has taken place. There's nothing more forlorn than discovering a blog so full of fun things to look at and pages to explore, only to realize that the energetic fashionista behind all those interesting looks and wardrobe wonders suddenly stopped posting with no explanation at all. There have been many times that a Google search for a particularly fantastic looking pair of shoes has led me to a blog chock full of cool outfits of the day and titillating treasures from a local clearance sale, but when I click on the heading at the top to see what this blogger is up to today (or what hairstyle she's sporting now or whether she's still with that guy who was taking all her pictures way back when), I sadly learn that she hasn't posted anything since 2014.

Well, I can definitely promise that that is not gonna happen here. But what's a person to do when just getting through a week requires a major commitment of time just to get to the weekend in one piece? I'm not going to offer any defense of my distraction here. But I will say that the new job is going well. (Definitely a lot less stress.) And I've been fortunate that previous employer is also retaining me for weekly free lance projects as well. A bit of a win/win, I'd say. I get to continue to work on the parts of my old job that I liked the best! And then there are my other free lance clients who must be feeling a bit more financially flush since I've been hearing from them more regularly since the beginning of the spring.

And then there's my tribute band that I launched in 2013. Nearly four years later, we're starting to pack a crowd into the bar we play in on a good night. (Sold the place out when we were there in February. Woo-hoo!) And other venues are interested in having us take a night on their stage now, too. So my creative energies are being distributed in a whole bunch of different directions. And while I can tell you I often think about sitting down and composing a fresh post, the truth is I end up spending that time at the end of long day working on song charts or practicing my parts or painting my nails or...or...just going to bed so get a little more sleep before morning arrives.

But last night, the drive for fabulous footwear reached critical mass when my partner in shoe lust, Melissa, steered me to some amazing clog boots she discovered on Pinterest. So often she finds something very cool that someone has posted there, but then we learn that whomever uploaded or shared that image hasn't provided any information about it. Who makes it? Where can you see more of it? Do they take PayPal? Will they ship to the U. S.? Don't you go showing me your cool kicks if you're not gonna give me the 411 to follow up on my own!

Last night, though, there was the briefest of URLs listed. And that was enough, with a little web sleuthing, to direct me to a glorious retailer in Spain who clearly feels as ecstatic about wooden shoes as I do and I hope as you do, too.

And I don't know if it's obvious to you from the picture, but those clog boots...

...are BLUE!!!

And not some mild-mannered shade of blue. They're so vividly imbued with a blue of the cobalt variety that you'd want to be concerned about heavy metal poisoning!

And just look at that shoe on the left.

THE SOLE IS STAINED BLUE, TOO!!!

Now if you haven't followed this blog for very long, you might not understand how I operate when it comes to footwear. For your ease of comprehension, I've created a simple flow chart depicting my approach to shoe shopping.

It's a fairly straightforward decision tree, and I can tell you that it has never let me down. So when I spotted those blue clog boots I described above, I immediately escalated to the next step to determine whether they might be available in my size. Through a few handy manipulations of the Google search algorithms, I discovered that the maker of these wonderful examples of wooden goodness is a designer named Elena Ferro, and her clogs are being manufactured under the name eferro and can be explored through her website at elenaferro.com.

So far so good.

I followed the link to the "galerías" to see if I could address the next step in my thought process: Do they come in my size? Well, I couldn't find the answer there, but I did stumble across an intriguing assortment of styles.

Oh, yes! It's clear that I'm in the right place. But what about size???

For that info I had to go here: elenaferro.com/en/12-woman-s-clogs. I have no explanation for the why, but for some reason this page full of women's styles cannot be found from the first link I unearthed. I only got here after further frantic digging. But it was worth the search because this page tells me...

1. They like to work in creative colorways.

2. The prices are incredibly reasonable.

3. They offer the expected range of women's sizes. But wait! What's that portion of a box hiding just below where it says size 40?

(scroll, scroll, scroll) LOOK AT THAT! THEY MAKE THEIR CLOGS IN A BUNCH OF TALL SIZES, TOO!

4. And not just women's shoes. They have men's styles available, too!

5. And don't overlook that bottom entry on the list: DESIGN YOUR CLOGS! Click that link, and you'll be taken to a page that has information on ordering a pair in whatever size you prefer, from 38 up to 46.

Well, that's what I did with part of my Saturday evening. A little web exploration...and the dispatching of a message to the eferro info@ e-mail address in hopes of learning how I can get myself in line for a pair of colorful clog boots. There's more to this story. Stay tuned!